Narrative #3 -- The King's College Governors

The royal charter signed by Lt. Governor James DeLancey on November 1, 1754, transferred responsibility for the College’s future well being from the 10-member Lottery Commission appointed by the Assembly to a 41-member Board of Governors, whose composition was proposed by the Lottery Commissioners and confirmed by the Lt. Governor and his Council. It consisted of 17 ex-officio positions and 24 other individuals specifically named in the charter. Those in the later category were to be replaced as needed through election by the governors. The ex-officio seats provided places for the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Secretary for Plantations, the senior member of the Governor’s Council, the Speaker of the Assembly, justices of the Supreme Court, the mayor of New York City and the rectors of the Anglican, Dutch, French, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches of New York City. The president of the College was also a member ex-officio. While not explicitly excluded, no provision was made for faculty membership on the governing board of the College, in keeping with the practice of the other colonial colleges but not that of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

In theory, the composition of the Board of Governors allowed a fairly broad spectrum of New York religious life. Only three of its members – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the rector of Trinity Church and the president of the College -- would necessarily be ys count on at least three other votes among ministerial insiders, those of the compliant President Cooper (who also acted as proxy for the Archbishop of Canterbury) and those of his assistant minister, Charles Inglis, elected in 1770 and immediately thereafter a fixture at board meetings, should any divisions arise. That first Inglis and then yet another Trinity assistant minister, Benjamin Moore (KC 1766), were installed as acting presidents upon Cooper's absences in 1771 and 1775 speaks to Auchmuty's authority within the board.

Ever the vigilant Churhman, Auchmuty complained to the Bishop of London whenever resident royal officials made the slightest gesture toward the non-Anglican majority within the province. The possibility that Governor Moore was thinking about appointing a Presbyterian to the Governor's Council in 1767 was enough to prompt visions of a civic apocalypse:

The only governor who attended more meetings than Auchmuty was Leonard Lispenard, who served throughout the Board’s 21-year history, for sixteen of them years as College Treasurer. Lispenard, one of New York City’s leading merchants, was of one of the City’s oldest Dutch families, members of which by mid- 18^th century had quietly left their inherited Dutch Reformed affiliations and their Dutch-speaking for membership in the city’s Anglican and English-speaking commercial elite. Like most of the laymen on the board, Lispenard had not gone to college and willingly left such academic matters as faculty appointments and admission requirements to his degree-bearing ministerial colleagues and to the president. On financial matters, however, such as seeing to the construction of College Hall, setting the rentals on the College’s water lots, determining the salary for the College steward, Lispenard and the other half-dozen most active governors drawn from the mercantile and legal ranks of the City exacted a reciprocal ministerial acquiescence. Thus an informal bifurcation of the functional responsibilities of the King’s College board by occupationally acquired expertise into either academic or financial affairs seems to have been put in place almost from the start. (This arrangement would survive the subsequent reorganization of Governors of King’s College as the Board of Trustees of Columbia in 1784-87 and persist into the 20^th century. Indeed, on the testimony of two recent Columbia presidents, it continued to be fully operational -- however by then anachronistic and dysfunctional -- through the 1960’s.)

Sources: Early Minutes of the Trustees, 1755-1770, Columbiana Room; Humphrey, From King's College, pp. 63-71; David Humphrey Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University.

In practice, the King’s College Board of Governors was from the start dominated by Anglicans, even more narrowly by Trinity Churchmen. When its named members were announced upon the signing of the charter, Henry Barclay, the rector of Trinity Church and thereby an ex-officio member, could triumphantly report, "we have a majority." Of the 59 men who served as governors of King’s College, only the three ex-officio members representing the French and Lutheran churches are identifiable as other than Anglican or Dutch Reformed. The City's Presbyterian minister never acknowledged his membership. Similarly, when William Livingston became speaker of the Assembly in 1759, and thus an ex-officio governor, he refused to accept the appoinment. Moreover, most of the half-dozen or so Dutch Reformed governors, led by Joannes Ritzema, rector of the Dutch Reformed Church, regarded themselves as theologically and socially far closer to their Anglican brethren than to the Presbyterian dissenters or even the Dutch speaking "enthusiasts" in their own denominational ranks (who went on in 1769 to found Queens College [Rutgers]).

The operational majority enjoyed by the ministers and vestrymen of Trinity within the Board of Governors was even more pronounced among the governors most regularly participated in its deliberations. The Board met on average five times a year (102 meetings in all), with most meetings attended by scarcely more than the quorum-requirement of fifteen governors. A quarter of all governors attended fewer than ten meetings during their tenure, while another half were absent more often than present. That left a core of sixteen or so governors, who, by virtue of their extended tenure and faithful attendance, ran the College. Of these, seven were ministers, five in the employ of Trinity Church. At least five of the other nine "actives" were Trinity communicants.

The Rev. Samuel Auchmuty epitomizes the governor-as-ministerial-insider. A Bostonian by birth and Harvard graduate (1742), he was Barclay's assistant minister at Trinity when he became the first governor to be elected to the board when an opening occurred in 1759. He succeeded Barclay as rector (and ex-officio Governor) in 1764. In his sixteen years as a governor, Auchmuty seems never to have missed a meeting. A forceful personality, he had little patience for Barclay’s relatively live-and-let-live ways. It was Auchmuty who pressed the board in Johnson's absence to turn to England for his successor and who then proceeded to ease Johnson out of the presidency. Thereafter, he could alwa